Page 100 of The Wolf and the Woodsman

One of the men still has a bow strapped to his back, and I find a quiver of arrows nearby. I pick up both and hold them to my chest with shaking hands.

We descend the stairs by muted torchlight. Tuula and Szabín are huddled in their cell, and Bierdna is an unmoving mass of matted fur, looking already half-killed. When Tuula sees me she stands slowly, rousing the bear too.

“Are you here to execute us, wolf-girl? Has the king finally given the order?”

“The king is dead,” I say.

Tuula draws in a quick breath, eyes wavering uncertainly.

“The pagans are coming,” I tell her. “Everyone from Keszi, and all the other villages. It’s madness. You have to leave.”

“Will they win?” Szabín asks.

I’m so taken aback by her question that it takes me a moment to answer, and with a snarling anguish I reply, “I don’t know.” I look to Katalin.

She shakes her head. The vision must not have gone that far.

Tuula’s expression is unreadable. “So are you here to free us, wolf-girl?”

“Yes,” I reply, swallowing around the hard thing in my throat. “Katalin . . .”

I turn to her expectantly, but all she does is scowl. “I still haven’t gotten an apology from the Juvvi girl, for setting that feral beast of hers on me.”

“Please,” I bite out. “Katalin, please.”

I don’t care how pitiful my wheedling is; desperation has chilled me like a fever, a cold sweat thickening on my brow. If I cannot save my father, if I cannot save Virág or Boróka or Gáspár, wherever he is now, at least I can do this.

Muttering unintelligibly, Katalin pushes past me and bends at the door of the cell, examining the lock. Her singing comes in stops and starts and grudging half-whispers, but when she finishes, she’s holding a small brass key in her hand.

“There,” she huffs, pressing it into my palm. “Now I won’t hear any more recriminations about my cruelty.”

My relief is fleetingly sweet. I turn the key in the lock and swing the cell door wide open, and then the door to Bierdna’s cell too. With a tightness in my chest I watch Tuula stroke the bear’s furry head, carefully loosening her chains and removing her muzzle, while Bierdna twitches her wet nose with contentment.

“Thank you, Évike,” Szabín says quietly. I think of how I hated her then, those days in Kaleva. My mind filled with mean thoughts about what an imbecile she was to think she could live peacefully with a Juvvi girl, when there were a hundred years of ugly history between them, and plenty of fresh blood besides. Perhaps I was only castigating myself, miserably aware that I was falling in love with a Woodsman.

“There’s an easy path out of the city,” I tell them, shaking my head. “Through the Woodsman barracks.”

“No path will be easy,” Katalin says. “The pagans have surrounded the city from the north. If you want to leave, you’ll need to go through it.”

I look down at the bow I snatched from the Woodsmen, knuckles whitening. “I suppose you aren’t leaving, then.”

“No,” she says. “There will be nowhere to go back to unless we win, just a blood-soaked clearing in the forest and a cluster of burning huts.”

I’m not clever enough, not well-versed enough in battle tactics to have a good sense of the odds. I only know there are so many wolf-girls who will die, no matter how the sword of fate swings, in the end. I know that Gáspár is still here—I must believe he’s alive, until the moment that I see light drain from his eye—and if I leave him I will be as unmoored as a ship set loose with no captain, a compass point spinning on and on and never finding its true north. And I know that Régország will not be safe for anyone I love unless Nándor is dead, and his memory drowned out by the sounds of a hundred voices shouting.

God’s name tastes sweet on my tongue. I lead the way out of the dungeon, down the labyrinth of hallways, to the door that leads to the Woodsman barracks. Tuula and Szabín and Katalin take swords from the weapons rack, blades flashing silver as fish tails. I add as many arrows as I can find to my quiver, breath clouding in the damp air. There is a pale light at the end of the tunnel, like an unblinking eye, and once we’re all girded in our iron we follow it, toward the roaring and snarling of battle ahead.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The mouth of the tunnel opens up under a mounded hillside, cached by bramble and wildflower brush, not far from the Woodsman stables. No sooner have we mowed our path through the coiling bracken than I feel something wet and hot splatter my face. Scarcely more than a yard away, a Woodsman’s limp body slides off its horse, chest gashed open to the red curve of muscle and crumpled white scaffolding of bone. I reach up to touch my face, and when I look down at my fingers again, they’re stained dark with blood.

A girl in a gray wolf cloak stands over him, brandishing a long thin sword. Her black hair waves like a flag of war, braids streaming down her back. Zsófia. I start to move toward her, the first syllable of her name on my lips, but before I can say a word a Woodsman sails by on horseback, his ax cleaving her head from her body.

The seconds seem to pass in sluggish agony, dripping like molten steel. Katalin flies down the hillside, fast as a flung spear, toward the Woodsman. Tuula and Szabín follow, the bear thrashing through the ferns and briar, lips pulled back from her long yellow teeth. Several feet away, where her head landed, Zsófia’s eyes stare up at me still shining, pearly with suspended terror.

Zsófia who tormented me, Zsófia who sang slurs at me, Zsófia who helped dress me in white for the Woodsmen—now dead by the arc of their ax. It feels like I have brought this fate upon her, as if all the hatred that ground my teeth at night somehow transmuted to real power. I open my mouth to whimper, to scream, but someone claps a hand over my face and drags me down into the bushes. Limbs flailing, I claw myself free and crawl away, only to turn around again and see that my attacker is Boróka.

“Évike,” she gasps, and throws her arms around me.